Reviews by Patricia Prijatel – Page 10

Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee

Pachinko is largely a game of chance, a combination of a pinball and a slot machine, with balls subtly manipulated behind the scenes by owners of the parlors in which it is played. It’s an onomatopoeia, a word that sounds like what it defines—pachinko. Popular in Japan after the Second World War, pachinko parlors were often run by Korean immigrants who had no other choice and were often called mobsters, no matter how honest they might have been. But, considering the prejudice against them, being considered Korean might have been just as bad as being considered a criminal.

Author Min Jin Lee titled her multigenerational novel Pachinko and, like much of the book, that was a stroke of genius. The book chronicles four generations of a Korean family who become immigrants in Japan and whose lives are like games of chance, one person’s actions sparking a reaction in another, then another, with powerful forces always maintaining some level of control.
But it’s also a book about human strength, family bonds, love, determination, and hope. It’s the type of book that makes a reader just want to settle down and soak up each page, reveling in the vivid character development, story, and sense of place.
The book begins:

History has failed us, but no matter.

Min Jin Lee is speaking of Koreans, and her story starts at the turn of the twentieth century, with a fisherman and his wife, who are never named, and their son Hoonie, born with a cleft palate and a limp, who comes of age just as Japan annexes Korea. And, for the rest of the book, Hoonie and his daughter, grandsons, and great grandson are pachinko balls, creating their personal history as they have to leave Korea but are never allowed to assimilate into Japan. Shoved into a ghetto, denied passports or the ability to work in any other than low-level jobs, the family nevertheless survives and never loses their spirit.

The thread holding the family, and the story, together in Sunja. Hoonie’s daughter, whose brief affair with a handsome stranger she meets in the market, forces her to marry the sweet, educated, but impoverished minister Isak. Their son, Noa, takes after the biological father he never knew exists, but reveres the loving man he thinks of as father. Yoseb, his uncle, and Kyanghee, his aunt, who have to children of their own, are like second parents. Sunja and Kyanghee become as close as sisters. A second son, Mozasu, completes the little family.

But always in the wings in Honsu, the stranger, an extremely wealthy gangster, who watches over Sunja and her family, like something between a godfather and a sinister uncle. Manipulating their lives to suit him.
Through war, death, birth, and the vagaries of fate, sexism and racism, Sunja and Kyanghee build lives for themselves and those they love. Minor characters—some Korean, some Japanese, some American, show that history and culture shape us but only confine us if we allow it

The book took her thirty years to write, and her dedication is apparent in every page. It’s a thick read—479 pages in the paperback version—but it’s a book you really don’t want to end.

— Pat Prijatel

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Considered by critics to be Cather’s best work, Death Comes for the Archbishop is a full-color portrait of the southwestern United States, especially New Mexico, and its people in the second half of the 19^th century. As she has done in other books, Cather catches a culture on the cusp of huge change—the “new” world pushes against the “old,” indigenous religions fight to maintain their beliefs while integrating with Catholicism, the strength and beauty of nature begins to face those who want to control it. The Americans are pitted against the French, the Spanish, the Indians, the Mexicans, although it is not clear who, in this context, actually is an American.

At the center of the story are two French missionaries, Jean Marie Latour and his good friend and assistant Joseph Vaillant. Their lives mirror the men on whom they are based: Latour on the first bishop of New Mexico, Jean-Baptiste Lamy and Vaillant on the first bishop of Colorado, Joseph Projectus Machebeuf.

Latour is sophisticated, thoughtful, and cool. Vaillant, who is a few steps beyond homely, is warm and engaging, enthusiastic about raising funds for missions and, ultimately, for the bishop’s dream: the cathedral. The two men are yin and yang, each showing strengths that combat the other’s weaknesses. Vaillant helps Latour establish himself in a land in which priests have been settled for hundreds of years, although those priests have been on their own, with no oversight from Rome, and they’ve created their own rules, or lack of them. They flagrantly take advantage of the local people and grow ostentatiously wealthy while living a life of pleasure, marrying, having children, and building a bit of a family business. Latour carefully and slowly forces the errant priests out of their parishes, and Vaillant is there to care for the parishioners, wherever or however he finds them.

The book is episodic, less like a novel and more like a series of short stories tied together by the missionaries and some continuing characters. Kit Carson plays a prominent role and, through him, Cather shows this country’s relationship with its earliest settlers, the Indians. Carson is married to an Indian and, in most cases, he acts like their friend. Yet, when the U.S. government wants to find a hideout where the Navajos stay safe, Carson leads the troops right there, causing the death of more than 100, and leading to the death of their way of life. Cather offers a poignant overview of that way of life:

They seemed to have none of the European\’s desire to “master” nature, to arrange and re-create. They spent their ingenuity in the other direction; in accommodating themselves to the scene in which they found themselves. This was not so much from indolence, the Bishop thought, as from an inherited caution and respect. It was as if the great country were asleep, and they wished to carry on their lives without awakening it; or as if the spirits of earth and air and water were things not to antagonize and arouse.

Perhaps the biggest contrast Cather creates is between the first chapter and the rest of the book. In that initial chapter, she introduces us to “three Cardinals and a missionary Bishop from America,” in an opulent villa overlooking Rome. The four men are fed exceptionally well and drink fine champagne, which feeds the Cardinals’ already overblown egos. They are committed to sending more missionaries to America but are not interested in the least in learning just what America is or who its people are and assume Indians all live in wigwams. Their evening ends over brandy and a sunset. These cardinals wouldn’t last a half hour in the territory to which they are sending missionaries, nor would their arrogant attitudes achieve many converts.

Characters throughout the book are compelling, real, and beautifully flawed, but the exquisite scenery is the real star, and Cather captures that with breathtaking clarity; the book is full of a love of the land and with descriptions that take the fine hand of a master. Perhaps her most-quoted description:

The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still, — and there was so much sky, more than at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one’s feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere anthills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky.

Death finally comes for the archbishop, after he has lived a long and full life. When one of his friends shows his obvious grief and wants to heal him from what looks and sounds like pneumonia, Latour simply says, ‘I shall not die of a cold, my son. I shall die of having lived.”

—Pat Prijatel

The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas

I am in awe of Angie Thomas’s accomplishment with this book. It has a moral without being moralistic and a message that creeps into your consciousness through believable, likable, and courageous characters, a complex and compelling storyline, and a city you can almost hear and smell, even though we have no idea where it actually is.

This is a book about the importance of speaking out, despite the very real risks it presents. It’s also about community, with interconnected themes of belonging and loyalty woven with race, police brutality, and black identity.

That’s a lot to pack in, but Thomas does it so elegantly the reader falls in love with these amazing people facing a decision: Can they go on as usual or is it time to challenge the power structure? In this case, that structure includes the police department and district attorney on the one hand and a drug lord and his minions on the other. Caught between these two, which do you align with? What happens when the answer is “neither”?

At the center of the story is Starr, a smart and perceptive Black teenager who sees her childhood friend Khalil killed by a police officer after a traffic stop for a bad brake light. She struggles with her responsibility to Khalil, her community, family, and ultimately to herself. She’s terrified of telling the truth, which implicates both the officer and the drug kings, but she finally realizes she has no choice.

Starr straddles two different communities with different cultures and language. In the neighborhood, she is the grocer’s daughter, who sometimes works in his store. At her school in a ritzy white neighborhood, she is only as cool as she needs to be. She’s in that school because her parents know she will not get the education and opportunities she needs and deserves if she stays in the local school. She’s not a total fit in either place.

She has to leave parts of her behind when she goes to school—her language, her stories, and certainly the fact that she was in the car when Khalil was killed. If the white kids know too much, she fears, they’ll see her as a ghetto kid and dismiss her. Eventually, loyalty to her community and trust from her white friends help her speak out.

Thomas began this book when she was an undergraduate in creative writing at Belhaven University in Jackson, Mississippi. She says she chose to write it as a young adult novel to make it more accessible and relatable—and she succeeded.

The book was inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, and the title comes from rapper Tupac Shakir’s THUG LIFE philosophy (and tatoo), an acronym for The Hate U Give Little Infants F*cks Everybody. Shakir says, “What you feed us as seeds, grows and blows up in your face.” When you force kids to live in a community that offers few opportunities besides drug dealing, you allow children to grow up broken and angry. But those are our kids, even if they don’t look or act like us—or we like them—and their world is connected to ours. Nothing happens in a vacuum. Ideally, we would be motivated to help black children get the same benefits as white because that is simply part of a just society. But THUG LIFE reminds us that, no matter our motivation, our inaction will come back to hurt us all.

—Pat Prijatel